10 May 1869 • Hartford, Conn. (Transcripts, MS, and MS facsimile: various sources, UCCL 00298)
American Publishing Co.Ⓐemendation
Hartford, Ⓐemendation May 10Ⓐemendation
I have been slow about answering but then I have been very busy & besides I wanted to consider a little.1explanatory note
1. Very well. Please go on, as you propose, & use my name “from Ⓐemendationthe 1st of November.”
2. ⒶemendationAs to terms. Say we let the customary price be $100, & Ⓐemendationincrease or diminish it according to circumstances—decreasing it, if you see fit, where several appointments, in one neighborhood can be clubbed together & secured Ⓐemendationby so doing. As to making it more than $100 in any case, be the judge yourself, I shall not complain if you never do it. ⒶemendationI talked all around through the West last winter, & always charged $100, but then the distances were grand, Ⓐemendationgloomy & peculiar and I wouldn’t Ⓐemendationgo over the same ground again for the same money, by any means. ⒶemendationI hate long journeys, Ⓐemendation& so does everybody.
(There need be no “condition” about ⒶemendationCalifornia. I shall be back before Nov. 1, if I go.)
I seldom save anything I write, or any notices of lectures. But the young lady whom I think most of, does, & I have written her.2explanatory note Whatever stock of this kind she may have on hand I will mail to you. I remember she has an article on Vanderbilt from Packard’s MonthlyⒶemendation—makes a column. Do you want it? in margin: Until I hear from her the enclosed is all I can put my hands on & they don’t signify. Ⓐemendation 3explanatory note I like the Du Chaillu dodge of circularizing the lyceums tolerably, & only tolerably. It is calculated to make one feel rather like a “celebrated” corn-doctor. But maybe it is for the best & therefore I will presently collect and send material for circular whereby to delude secretaries.
(Mem.—Mr. Bridgman (I think I have the name right) Secretary of the Something (“Institute,” ⒶemendationI think,) called this morning to talk business.4explanatory note I told him you would attend to his case whenever his mind is made up. Please don’t charge him less than $100—& I don’t think it would be just to charge more. However, that is your business, not mine.)Ⓐemendation
... I am here reading the proofs of my book, which will issue from the press of the “American Publishing Co.” Ⓐemendation... It is a sort of stunning narrative of the renowned Pleasure Excursions of Capt. Duncan’s Quaker City steamer to Europe, Egypt, Palestine, & Ⓐemendationpretty nearly everywhere else, two years ago. (The one Beecher & Gen. Sherman were to have gone in).5explanatory note It will contain about 700 pages octavo, ... over 200 artistic engravings built expressly for it. Some 26 ... are full page.... The pictures have cost $5,000 ... it is no slouch of a book.... Ⓐemendation the New England journals.6explanatory note The book is published only by subscription.
If I go to California I shall write a dozen letters to the N. Y. Tribune, & if you can have them copied wholly or in part, it will be well—especially as the title of next winters Ⓐemendationlecture will be “Curiosities of California.” Haven’t written it yet, but it is mapped out, & suits me very well. {Mem. Nearly all the societies wanted a Cal. lecture last year, & of course it will be all the better, now, when the completion of the Pacific RR has turned so much attention in that direction.7explanatory note There is scope to the subject, for the country is a curiosity; do. the fluctuations of fortune in the mines, where men grow rich in a day & poor in another; do. the people—for you have been in new countries & understand s that;8explanatory note do. the Lake Tahoe, whose wonders are little known & less appreciated here; ditto the never-mentioned strange Dead Sea of California;9explanatory note & ditto a passing mention, maybe, of the Big Trees & Yo Semite.
But I did not intend to write you to death.Ⓐemendation
But a word more. A New York agent writes: “Stick to New England if you are resolved to do it, but let me make, say ten Ⓐemendationengagements for you in near places in New York & Penn. Select any month you please and any price (125.—$150 &cⒶemendation) but let me have your name for that number of engagements.”10explanatory note
What shall I say? I almost promised to open the courses next season in Newark, N. J. Pittsburgh, Pa. & I think Cleveland, O. provided I lectured at all. Now Ⓐemendation I would like to talk in Newark, Brooklyn & New York, but I don’t want to go further away, & I don’t know of ten places around there that I want to talk in. Make a suggestion, please.
I would like very much to talk in about five small places first, to get the hang of my lecture, & then talk for one of the two big lecture societies of Boston. You know one corrects & amends portions Ⓐemendationof his lecture th all the time, the first five or six nights, & he never Ⓐemendationis satisfied with it till about the sixth delivery. Will you make a note? Well, I believe I have answered it all of your letter
I don’t try to use two lectures during the same season. And I don’t like an old one.Ⓐemendation
Clemens was answering the following letter from Redpath, itself a reply to Clemens’s letter of 20 April:
Redpath’s enclosures do not survive with his letter. One of them may have been a circular advertising Paul Belloni Du Chaillu (1835–1903), the French-born African explorer and author.
Clemens made his request of Olivia in a 10 May letter, now lost (see 9 May 69 to OLL, n. 5click to open link). Her reply, enclosing reviews, reached him on 14 May.
The enclosures have not been located, but may have included some of the “American Vandal Abroad” reviews that Redpath later used in “circularizing the lyceums” for the 1869–70 lecture season (see Boston Lyceum Bureau Advertising Circularclick to open link).
William S. Bridgman (or Bridgeman), assistant cashier at the Hartford National Bank, was vice president of the Hartford Young Men’s Institute. Organized in 1838 to foster “literary culture” and to take advantage of “the lectures then being delivered before lyceums the country round,” the institute maintained a reading room and a library that had grown to over 20,000 volumes by 1869 (Burpee, 1:381; Geer 1869, 61, 489, 505).
For Henry Ward Beecher’s and William Tecumseh Sherman’s reasons for withdrawing from the Quaker City excursion, see L2 , 24–25 n. 3, and 50–51 n. 1.
6 In the missing passage preceding this phrase Clemens evidently suggested that reviews of The Innocents Abroad appearing in New England newspapers would prove useful in publicizing his lecture tour.
The spike-driving ceremony at Promontory, Utah, celebrating the meeting of the tracks of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, and hence the completion of the transcontinental line, took place on the day Clemens wrote this letter (Hart 1987, 191). That morning the Hartford Courant advised its readers that the event was set for “about 2:35 p.m., Hartford time”:
Arrangements have been made with the Western Union Telegraph company, so that each stroke of the hammer on the last spike driven shall be reported simultaneously at New York and San Francisco. The operator will accompany each blow of the hammer with a tap of the finger upon the key. A conversation with the New York office last evening assured us that the blow can be repeated at Hartford as well, and moreover, it could be struck upon the great fire bell. Why not? Who will attend to it? Let us hear upon the bell the strokes of the hammer that puts down the connecting rail twenty-five hundred miles away. (“The Pacific Railroad,” 2)
In the mid- and late 1850s, Redpath, then a journalist crusading for abolition, had made several visits to recently created Kansas Territory, the site of contention between pro- and anti-slavery forces. In an Autobiographical Dictation of 11 October 1906 Clemens commented on Redpath’s activities there:
The chief ingredients of Redpath’s make-up were honesty, sincerity, kindliness, and pluck. He wasn’t afraid. He was one of Ossawattomie Brown’s right-hand men in the bleeding Kansas days; he was all through that struggle. He carried his life in his hands, and from one day to another it wasn’t worth the price of a night’s lodging. He had a small body of daring men under him, and they were constantly being hunted by the “jayhawkers,” who were pro-slavery Missourians, guerrillas, modern free lances— (CU-MARK, in SLC 1907, 330)
Subsequently Redpath traveled to Haiti, which he regarded as a suitable haven for Southern blacks. At the request of the Haitian government he established bureaus for black emigration in Boston and New York and in 1861 and 1862 he served as “Commercial agent of Hayti for Philadelphia, Joint commissioner plenipotentiary of Hayti to the government of the U.S., & General agent of emigration to Hayti for the U.S. & Canada” (Redpath). He was influential in securing United States recognition of Haitian independence, wrote A Guide to Hayti (1860), and published John Relly Beard’s Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography (1863).
Mono Lake, about fifteen miles east of Yosemite, “so alkaline that only one kind of brine shrimp and one kind of fly can live in it” (Hart 1987, 327). On 27 June Clemens began writing his lecture on California, the only surviving fragment of which contains a detailed description of Lake Tahoe (see 26 June 69 to JLC and PAM, n. 5click to open link).
Probably James K. Medbery (see 21 Sept 69 to Crane, n. 2click to open link).
This five-leaf, ten-page letter has been reconstructed from four separate sources:
P1 and P2 derive independently from the MS. Where the MS and an MS facsimile survive, P3 and P4 respectively serve as sole copy-text for the letter. The extracts in P1 were published in AAA 1925, lot 107, when the MS was intact. P2, a partial TS in CU-MARK made by Frank Glenn in 1943, was prepared from the MS after two leaves (pages 5–6 and 7–8) had been removed from it. P3, one of those leaves (pages 7–8), survives in the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (CtY-BR). P4, a photofacsimile of MS page 10, was published with the P1 extracts in AAA 1925, lot 107.
L3 , 214–218; Previous publication: none known except P.1
Provenance: The MS was intact in 1925, when it was sold as part of the library of William F. Gable (AAA 1925, lot 107). By 1940, two leaves (MS pages 5–6 and 7–8) had been removed from the letter (Parke-Bernet 1940, lot 69), and by 1942 they had been tipped into first edition copies of The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, respectively, which were sold as part of the estate of William H. Woodin of New York (Parke-Bernet 1942, lot 129, which mistakenly identifies the recipient of Clemens’s letter as “Major Pond, his lecture manager”). The remainder of the letter (MS pages 1–4 and 9–10) was transcribed by Frank Glenn, a Kansas City, Mo., book dealer, with no indication that any text was missing, and the transcription was sent to Bernard DeVoto in 1943. The copy of Roughing It containing MS pages 7–8 was donated to CtY in 1943 by George Corey, but the present location of the rest of the MS is not known. Adopted readings followed by ‘(C)’ are editorial emendations of the source readings.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.